Fight-Metric: Functional Identication Of Gate-Level Hardware Trustworthiness

To address the concern that a complete detection scheme for effective hardware Trojan identication is lacking, we have designed an RTL security metric in order to evalu-ate the quality of IP cores (with the same or similar func-tionality) and counter Trojan attacks at the pre-fabrication stages of the IP design ow. The proposed security metric is constructed on top of two criteria, from which a quantita-tive security value can be assigned to the target circuit: 1) Distribution of controllability; 2) Existence of rare events. The proposed metric, called FIGHT, is an automated tool whereby malicious modications to ICs and/or the vulner-ability of the IP core can be identied, by monitoring both internal node controllability and the corresponding control value distribution plotted as a histogram. Experimentation on an RS232 module was performed to demonstrate our dual security criteria and proved security degradation to the IP module upon hardware Trojan insertion. Copyright 2014 ACM